Friday, December 30, 2011

Cynsational News & Giveaways

Lessons Lived by J. Anderson Coats from EMU's Debuts. Peek: "She grabbed two of us by the forearms and said, “Look, guys. We’re in New York. They want us to dance with a Broadway cast. When do you think this is ever going to happen again?"

How to Install IndieBound Reader on Kindle Fire by Samantha Clark from Motivation for Writers. Peek: "While the default settings for the Kindle Fire don’t allow the installation of apps that are not in the Amazon Store, including the IndieBound Reader app, there’s a quick and easy way to allow your Kindle Fire to accept these outside apps."

What I've Learned about Writing Nonfiction by Cynthia Levinson from EMU's Debuts. Peek: "Trust my editor. Her probing questions—'Is it really accurate to say that the civil rights movement was failing?', 'Why does it matter who was the mayor?'—led to revisions and expansions that were absolutely essential."

Updated Young Adult Dystopian List by Amy H. Sturgis from Redecorating Middle-Earth in Early Lovecraft. Peek: "I am intentionally casting a wide net by defining 'dystopian' works as those that imply a warning by describing a world gone wrong: utopias that took a bad turn, worst-case scenario post-apocalyptic societies, post-disaster tales that focus more on the undesirable communities that develop after the disasters than on the disasters themselves, etc."

Contains Strong Language by Ash Krafton from QueryTracker.netBlog. Peek: "Perhaps the most valuable advice I'd found was the simplest concept: word choice. The strength of a word determines the effect it will have on the reader."

Books into Apps: An Author's Perspective by Roxie Munro from ALSC Blog. Peek: "We hired a graduate student for six months to do marketing (very important!). Regular book review venues are not always helpful with apps. You have to reach individual parents, and the audience is worldwide. The maze apps sell in 64 countries (no language issue) and the Doors app, which is in English, sells in 24 countries."

Are Your Dreams Big Enough? Shooting for the Moon by Kristi Holl from Writer's First Aid. Peek: "I’m big on goal setting. And I’m not trying to set you up for a big fall. However, I sometimes wonder if all of us achieve less simply because we start out with 'reasonable, achievable' goals instead of reaching for the stars."

List of Picture Book Agents by Heather Ayris Burnell from Frolicking through Cyberspace. Peek: "As a picture book writer I know it can be difficult to track down which agents represent picture book authors. Not author/illustrators (how I wish I could illustrate!), but authors only."

A Year of Thinking About Diversity by Malinda Lo from Diversity in YA Lit. Peek: "...after a year of working on Diversity in YA, my own awareness of diversity has shifted immensely. I think about books differently. I think about writing differently. I actively notice whether a book is about a person of color or not. I’ve seen where my own fears and assumptions have limited me, both in my writing and in my everyday engagement with race and sexual orientation/gender identity." Note: thank you to Malinda and Cindy Pon for their efforts this past year.

Show and Tell by Danyelle Leafty from QueryTrackerBlog.net. Peek: "... I think show, don't tell is more about balance than choosing one thing or the other. There will be some places in the story where telling works more effectively than showing, but the trick is figuring out which ones."

Cover Stories: Witch Eyes by Scott Tracey from Melissa Walker. Peek: "People tell me that my book is dark – I don’t see it that way, but I definitely think of it as ‘serious.’ As serious as a book about a gay witch cursed with magic eyes who walks into the middle of a feud between powerful warlocks can be, at least."

Environment, War and Fantasy: Janni Lee Simner's Bones of Faerie and Faerie Winter by J.L. Powers from The Pirate Tree: Social Justice and Children's Literature. Peek: "When I started writing the Faerie books, I think a part of me wanted straightforward answers. I wanted my characters to eventually find a way of saying, 'And now, with all we’ve learned, we’re going to see to it for certain that tragedies like the war never happen again'–even though we’ve never yet managed that in our own world.But my characters, who so often understand my stories better than I do, wouldn’t let me get away with that."

Revision Strategies - A Chapter Worksheet by Dee Garretson from Project Mayhem: From the Manic Minds of Middle Grade Writers. Peek: "Once I have a draft I’m fairly happy about, I go back and revise by chapters, trying to ensure each chapter holds together as a unit itself and adds to the story as a whole."

Creative Cajones by Sara Zarr from Good Times and a Noodle Salad. Peek: "I’m very glad to be making my living as a writer, and know how fortunate I am to do so, and believe artists should be paid. I just don’t want to cling to my situation so tightly that I forget to make at least some choices based on passion and joy and the desire for adventure, growth, challenge. To take a chance now and then." Source: Janni Lee Simner at Desert Dispatches.

The Excitement of a Small-town Setting by Elizabeth S. Craig from Writing Mystery is Murder. Peek: "When everyone knows everyone else, you feel the need to hide things that you don’t want the whole town knowing about."

Goal-setting for Writers by Jane Lebak from QueryTrackerBlog.net. Peek: "Without goals, we lack a means to judge our performance. In setting goals, however, we must be careful to make 'us-dependent' goals rather than 'them-dependent' goals."

Note: "Haunted Love" has been in the top 10 in Youth and YA at Books on Board for the past four weeks! Thank you for your support!

Cynsational Giveaways

Enter to win Dreaming Anastasia and Haunted by Joy Preble (both Sourcebooks)! To enter, comment on this post (click preceding link and scroll) and include an email address (formatted like: cynthia at cynthialeitichsmith dot com) or a link to an email address. Or email Cynthia directly with "Joy Preble" in the subject line. Publisher-sponsored. Eligibility: U.S. Deadline: midnight CST Dec. 31. See also Joy Preble on Embracing Risk.

My initial deadline on Smolder and the release of Diabolical are both at the end of January, so I've been revising my work-in-progress and setting up promotional initiatives for the launch.

On the manuscript front, I have one major character shift to make--a secondary character is being rewritten from a twelve-year-old female werecat to a forty-five-year-old male human attorney. Otherwise, the story seems to be working in the whole.

What it needs right now is to be more--more suspenseful, more mysterious, more romantic, funnier, and sharper in its surprises.

With regard to the launch, my wonderful publisher, Candlewick Press, does the heavy lifting. I'll be showing off my new bookmark and announcing tour dates soon. But I am pitching in here and there, as we authors tend to do. On a related note, COS Productions is distributing my Diabolical trailer, and I'm shopping for next month's Diabolical mega giveaway.

Review of Diabolical by Cynthia Leitich Smith from MaryAnn and Gabrielle at Chapter by Chapter. Peek: "Smith has a writing style that is so addictive! With all the different twists and turns throughout the book…omgosh! Sooo good. How many more plot twists can Smith come up with? Just when I think that there couldn’t possibly be anything else she can come up with, I’m foiled yet again! I just love, love love (!) her writing so much…"